Is it possible that the Big Bang never really took place? If it didn’t have a beginning, won’t there be an end to the universe either? Is everything there is just an illusion? Physicist Bruno Bento of the University of Liverpool and Stav Zalel of Imperial College London have proposed an interesting new theory that states that the universe may not have had an origin, which means that there was no singularity of any kind 13,700 ago. millions of years that allowed everything to rapidly expand from a few atoms to an expanse too vast for the human brain to understand. What we perceive as past and future could be infinite.
“Reality, which has been studying the nature of time for years, has many things that most people would associate with science fiction or even fantasy,” explains Bento.
There is a limit that we cannot cross when it comes to singularities or parts of space-time where everything we know about physics suddenly loses its meaning .
It turns out that general relativity doesn’t hold up with singularities like black holes and the Big Bang. In their study, published on the prepress server arXiv, they used causal set theory to propose that space and time may not be what we think they are.
The universe is a particular moment of a causal whole
Thus, according to the theory of quantum gravity, which divides space and time into parts of space-time, there is a basic unit of space-time at a certain level. Applying this theory to the beginning of the universe they discovered that it was possible that the universe had no beginning. It has always existed in the infinite past and only now has it become what we call the Big Bang.
That is, if for example we are looking at a computer screen to read this article, everything seems fluid and continuous. But if we looked at the same screen through a magnifying glass, we could see the pixels dividing the space and we would find that it is impossible to close two images on the screen in a single pixel.
This theory of causal sets has important implications for the nature of time. “An important part of all causal philosophy is that the passage of time is something physical, which should not be attributed to some kind of emergent illusion or something that happens inside our brain that makes us think that time is passing; this step is, in itself, a physical manifestation of the theory. Therefore, in causal set theory, a set will grow one ‘atom’ at a time, getting bigger and bigger, ”Bento clarifies.
Goodbye to the singularity
The causal set method clearly eliminates the Big Bang singularity drawback as a result of the idea that singularities cannot exist. And without the singularity of the Big Bang, how does the beginning of our universe appear?
Well, it would have existed forever and the Big Bang would never be a true beginning but rather a particular moment in the evolution of this “all causal”.
It is not that general relativity has simply disappeared. It can explain everything we see through direct observations, whether with a telescope, with the naked eye, or otherwise. Therefore, our solar system and everything that can be observed in it is real.
Referencia: If time had no beginning Bruno Valeixo Bento, Stav Zalel / Comments: 5 pages, 4 figures
Subjects: General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology (gr-qc)
Cite as:arXiv:2109.11953 [gr-qc] (or arXiv:2109.11953v1
